Memories Upon Moments
by FuneralCricket
Summary: Moments in the lives of the members of Hogwart's best army. Oneshot collection. Written for the Alphabet Prompts challenge.
1. Aurora

**_1. Aurora_**

**_Note:_**_This is a series of vignettes/drabbles/short stories/ oneshots written in response to reminiscent-afterthought's Alphabet Prompts Challenge. The character group I chose was the D.A. The chapters in this collection are all unrelated to each other._

The two best moments in Susan Bones's life were exactly nine years apart. May 1, 1988 and May 1, 1997.

May 1, 1988 was her nine-and-a-half birthday. Her actual ninth birthday was November 1, exactly six months before that, but it was a tradition in the Bones family to celebrate half-birthdays as well as actual birthdays. For her 9½ birthday, she and her Aunt Amelia had journeyed to Alaska to see the Aurora Borealis—the Northern Lights.

Late April or early May was not a good time of year to see the Aurora Borealis, but little Susan had believed in the power of miracles. Amelia, although well-known for her no-nonsense attitude, could not refuse the pleading child. So, she braved the cold weather and went with her niece Susan to Alaska in the futile hope of seeing the lights.

Much of the trip is lost to the ebb and flow of memories in the intervening years. But Susan recalls one moment perfectly.

She and her aunt are standing huddled together in the cold, jackets and sweaters stuffed on indiscriminately. It is a full moon, and the pale face in the skies shines down on them. Amelia is suppressing the desire to snap at Susan for dragging her to the wilderness, taking up a week of her time.

Susan is oblivious to her irate aunt; her blue eyes are fixed on the heavens. The night is cold, but she is waiting with bated breath, just as the moon and stars are waiting. The whole _world_ is waiting.

Finally, at midnight, a flicker of green flashes across the sky. Susan inhales sharply. Aunt Amelia looks up at her gasp, and her jaw drops as well. Together the two of them stretch their necks back and watch as the displays light up the sky and the world for two hours. The sight of the northern lights against the full moon is surreal—it cannot be from this world.

When the Aurora Borealis finally fades and the sky is once again a velvety black sprinkled with stars, Susan lets out a long sigh of air, seeing her own breath turn to wisps of white in front of her and disappear into the ether. Seeing the northern lights has left her awestruck with wonder, but they have also filled her with a terrible sadness. She feels as though she has lost something and can do nothing but weep. The world seems a little less bright without the displays. This strange feeling—amazement and bereavement and joy all mixed up—is almost too much for the nine-year-old.

The bittersweetness of that moment remained with her throughout her life. Even though it hurt her and baffled her and confused her so much at the same time, her greatest desire was to _feel_ so strongly once again.

She carried the memory of that moment in her heart, but _remembering_ a feeling is not the same as _feeling_ it. Susan tried, over and over, to re-experience it, but trying to recreate the exact details of a memory is like reading a faded letter read too many times. And the more she strained her mind, the duller it grew.

So she struggled with the memory for nearly a decade, as she continued on with her life, through beginning at Hogwarts, losing her dear Aunt Amelia, the rise of Voldemort, and the tumult that fills her adolescent years.

It was not until May 1, 1997, the Battle of Hogwarts, that she finally managed to re-live that memory.

She was standing outside the castle with the other front-liners, ready to die defending her school and home. The protective forcefield that McGonaGall had cast around the school was crumbling rapidly, but it was putting up a good fight. The midnight deadline had passed. The spells of the Death Eaters attempting to break in were flashing against the forcefield, and to the Hogwartians on the inside, it looked hauntingly like the Aurora Borealis lights that Susan had admired exactly nine years ago—right to the minute.

Half a lifetime ago, Susan had stood with awe underneath a full moon and northern lights, and tasted bittersweetness for the first time in her life. Half a lifetime later, she stood on the threshold of her castle and tasted it again.

She was prepared to go down fighting. She knew the odds were grim and she might not live to see daylight, yet she knew that she would have died fighting for what was right.

The knowledge of that—that even if she died, she had still triumphed in a way—filled her with bittersweetness once again. Susan allowed the emotion that had taunted her for half her life to fill her entire being. Northern lights and bittersweet—somehow the two were connected, at least for her. She let out a breath and squared her shoulders as the forcefield finally collapsed and the Death Eaters swarmed the grounds.

Two moments of bittersweetness and Aurora Borealis, both exactly half a lifetime apart. One under circumstances that could not be better, one under circumstances that could not be worse. Susan viewed those two moments as the best moments of her life.


	2. Battalion

When she closes her eyes at night, Padma Patil sees battles happening before her in the darkness.

Since a young age she has always been much too obsessed with what she should not know. Forbidden knowledge is the apple of temptation for her, the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden that Eve bit into. Her grandmother used to joke that if in the next life she is reincarnated as a Christian, she will be named Eve.

Padma is naturally drawn to knowledge and intelligence. She is, after all, a Ravenclaw. She believes resolutely that wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure. In her first few months at Hogwarts, her only friends were her sister and the Gray Lady, resident ghost of her House. Padma was one of the few people who knew the Gray Lady's story, and she sympathized with Helena, whom knowledge was the downfall of.

However, although she is attracted to knowledge, she isn't always brave enough to seek it. Ravenclaws are not renowned for their bravery. That's where Parvati comes in.

The two girls are different as any two people can be—a Gryffindor and a Ravenclaw, one always in the library and the other doing Divination homework, one practically a hermit and the other a social animal—but they love each other dearly. The twins complement each other and make up for each other's weaknesses. Their grandmother used to lament that although they are identical twin sisters, they are as different as night and day. Parvati and Padma don't feel that way though—rather, they instead consider themselves two sides of the same coin.

Padma is the one who seeks the knowledge, and Parvati, with her Gryffindor courage, is the one who gets it. The Patil partnership began at a young age, when they were five years old and living in India.

The girls, like most Indian children, grew up on the many and varied tales of Indian mythology. Their grandmother, however, filtered the stories that they read so that the girls were condemned to reading stuffy little sermons and happy-ending stories. She also only allowed them to read the Ramayana, and not India's other great epic—the Mahabharata. The Ramayana was comprised of characters who represented ideal roles in society—ideal son, ideal wife, ideal warrior, etc. The main characters were all reincarnations of gods on earth whose lives were already decided before they were born.

Both Parvati and Padma quickly grew bored with the way the Ramayana dryly narrated Rama's perfect life, never deviating once from right and wrong. The Mahabharata, on the other hand, was a much more accurate representation of real life—how many stories, many personal agendas and lives all came together in the great catastrophe of the Kurukshetra war. No one can claim to have followed the rules of life completely. Their grandmother, however, did not want the girls to be traumatized by the story of a family torn in two by war.

Even at a young age, Padma longed to read the Mahabharata. She shared her secret desire with Parvati, who agreed to sneak the copy to their bedroom. That night, Parvati lugged the huge volume tucked away under their grandmother's bed and together they read the forbidden story.

Most of all Padma was captivated by the story of the hero Abhimanyu. For much of his childhood, his father and uncles, the Pandavas, were exiled, cheated out of their father's kingdom by their cousins the Kauravas. His mother Subhadra raised him and the other children of his father and uncles, during the thirteen years of exile. When finally the Pandavas returned and began preparing for the war against the Kauravas to win back their kingdom, his marriage was arranged to the princess Uttara.

He was eager to help his uncles in the war, but he was only sixteen. Nevertheless, he was the greatest warrior of his time. On the thirteenth day of the 18-day Kurukshetra war, he was finally allowed to fight in battle. The Kauravas, knowing they could not him easily, used the terrible formation of the thousand-petaled lotus to trap him. Knowing he was doomed, he chose to make his death as expensive for the enemy as possible. In one day, the boy killed 10,000 soldiers.

Eventually six of the Kauravas' best warriors began attacking him at once, even though the war code dictated that only one warrior would engage another in combat at a time. Undaunted, he continued fighting even after his bow and chariot were destroyed. He picked up a wheel of his chariot and used it to continue to fight. After that broke as well, he fought his enemies with a mace until finally his opponent crushed his skull. Abhimanyu died, but his death had been terribly costly for the Kauravas. In the days that followed, his uncles killed the men responsible for his death, and he was remembered forever for his bravery.

Over and over, Padma has imagined what the last day of Abhimanyu's short life must have been like. His boundless delight at being allowed to fight. The unyielding determination that pulled his muscles taut and sent his arrows flying with dead-on precision. The terror he must have known when he was trapped inside the formation. His decision to die a hero. The resourcefulness that enabled him to use a chariot wheel.

And every night, when she goes to sleep, she sees the battalion in the shape of a thousand-petaled lotus dancing before her, capturing the sixteen-year-old boy in one of its countless curves. For when she thinks of Abhimanyu, she thinks not of him holding aloft a wheel, or sending arrows flying at ten thousand warriors, but of a boy trapped who did not let resignation guide him, but resolve.


	3. Chapter 3

When the Battle of Hogwarts arrived, Anthony fought because it was the right thing to do, not because he believed in the cause.

No, he certainly didn't believe that Voldemort and his minions were right. He despised the way they slaughtered Muggles, Muggle-borns, blood traitors, and anyone else who disagreed with them as much as anyone else did. What he didn't believe was that people with such differences could live relatively peacefully together.

Anthony Goldstein's identity is made up of halves. He is a half-blood—witch mother, Muggle father. He is half-Christian and half-Jewish. His name indicates his bi-religious heritage: _Anthony_ is the name of a Christian saint, chosen by his mother, while _Goldstein_ is his father's name, a common Jewish surname.

His father used to tell him that he would be the bridge between two worlds. Anthony, however, thinks that it isn't possible to bridge two worlds; there is always a gap between them. The best that can happen is a few bold individuals live with one foot in each. That option is not available to Anthony, however, because he _is _the gap.

All his life Anthony has found himself ostracized for being half of each world. Half Muggle, half wizard, half Christian, half Jewish, half everything. He hates feeling permanently cleaved in two, and condemned to stay that way. So he decides that he's not going to try to reunite two worlds. If the inhabitants of each are living in peace with their own kind, and everyone is happy, why bother?

This attitude sustains him throughout his years at Hogwarts. He lives in the gap, the void between two worlds. He's permanently stuck in a ravine, in a crevice. On each side of him is a view high up of one of the two worlds he is caught between—a distant paradise that will never be his. And he's fine with that. He knows his place in the world, and everyone else is happy with where he is. Why should he interfere with the harmony of the world?

It is only after the Battle, when he sees that there are many other people who also live in crevices, that he realizes his folly. The mistake of a lifetime. It's impossible to unite two worlds—which is _exactly_ why you must unite them. World harmony doesn't come from human beings isolating themselves and living in their own little villages. World harmony can exist only when people can set aside their differences and live with each other.

Anthony can't climb out of his crevice. Not right away. The lifetime he's spent moping in his own little fissure has left him buried so deep it takes years of patience to climb back out. Once he's climbed out, he has to learn how to bring the two worlds together. To unite the two shores never meant to unite.

But try he does. For the only life he will accept is in a world in which all worlds coexist peacefully. Not in a crevice.


End file.
